Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 25 June 2010. No comments.
Forty years on and Erich Segal’s “Love Story” makes a surprisingly spikey and yet delicious show in Chichester Festival Theatre’s Minerva Theatre. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies / Mind and body on 28 April 2010. No comments.
For long stretches of I Am Love, I was bowled over in much the way I imagine the movie-makers intended. It had risible patches which didn’t quite shake the wheels off the wagon. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / TV and Radio on 16 April 2010. One comment.
There is an enormous amount to be said for Africa. Stoicism and good humour would be right up there as attributes which abound. Famously, Nigerians have all that in spades. Last night’s BBC film concentrated on a Lagos rubbish dump and its scavengers. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 4 April 2010. No comments.
Did you watch the Boat Race coverage? I was struck by the way Dan Snow (who rowed in several) went on and on about how winning it was lovely but losing it marked you for life. I forget the details, but it all left a powerful impression of a generation of athletes for whom winning is a graceless necessity whilst losing is a psychological catastrophe. This is bizarre and applies to other butch moderns. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 14 March 2010. No comments.
The Observer ran a story about a pair of economists, Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran, who think they’ve proven that affluent societies are beset by a horrible envy, and I lobbed up on the BBC News Channel to opine. Here’s what I said and what I should have said. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / TV and Radio on 2 March 2010. No comments.
Searle is 90 tomorrow and Channel 4 News ran a tribute interview. Typically, the commentary had to have a little attitudinising. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 1 January 2010. No comments.
Note: If this were a review, it could have been much shorter and just said: “Buy this book. It’s lovely, sharp and beguiling”. I wanted to write something which drew on the experiences Andrew Brown and I shared, not least but not only at the Independent in the late 1980s. I also wanted to touch on the whole business of memoir- and nature-writing. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / Politics and campaigns on 24 December 2009. No comments.
Here we go again. We are headed for an epoch-making election with an opposition leader who has a horror of authenticity. We don’t need atavastic politics, but it is a big danger that we have political stars whose charisma depends on being bland and controlling. Mr Cameron could do far better. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 11 December 2009. No comments.
Is this the best eating in Paris? Quite possibly. Here’s my case for L’Auberge Bressane, and the neighbourhood food shops, in the “toney” 7th arrondissement. It’s all a demonstration of the homage affluence pays to authenticity. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Mind and body / Politics and campaigns on 1 December 2009. 2 comments.
Most of the books on global warming science and policy are pretty muddled, hysterical or dreamy by turns. Very few have real quality. Mike Hulme’s book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change seems to be in a different class. More »
